Single Malt Spirit | 55% ABV

Score: 7/10

**Very Good Indeed.**
***TL;DR***
*Amazingly fresh and very yum*

Hard to create, easy to critique

This might be a recurring theme to some long-time readers but for those of you new to Dramface; welcome!

This is an open forum and perhaps something you might have experience with. In general, many people don’t have any experience with the full lifecycle of creating products. It drives me nuts, and here’s why.

First, there’s the conception of the idea where you daydream about the awesome thing you’re going to create and how it’s going to blow everyone away. I know we’ve all done it with building our own “dream distillery” in our head, mentally spec’ing out the maltings, stills, barley variety, casking, location… you get the point.

Second, there comes the funding estimation. Money doesn’t grow on trees after all and you’ve now had to do some hard thinking and simple math to arrive at an eye watering cost and profit comparison, looking at how much facilities take to build including all of your “dream” equipment, the requisite government inspections, the necessary time delay to release your product as whisky nevermind when it’s ready, the distribution costs and the all-mighty tax man taking big ol’ slice of your fun away.

Third, you have to turn around and find someone also slightly crazy to help you fund this hair-brained scheme of yours. Investing in a distillery is objectively a stupid idea. You don’t start earning a return on investment for perhaps a decade after investment even if you begin selling whisky at the earliest possible point; investors won’t want to kill the distillery off by trying to recoup their investment too soon and hampering the cash flow when the distillery is trying to find its legs.

And lastly, you have to turn around and market your product in an already crowded space where long-standing giants occupy the mainstream and the small guys are left elbowing for position in the margins.

So creating something is not for the faint of heart or light on willpower. And the vast majority of people very likely don’t understand that because they’ve never had to create something. Their day jobs may be a semi-monotonous structured affair where long-standing processes and procedures have driven any sort of kaizen or innovation, never mind the gumption required for true development, from their frontal cortex.

And so when the general public and so-called reviewers or dare I say ‘experts’ attempt to review and critique a product, their arguments generally don’t hold much water. And yes, I’m effectively poo-pooing myself here with this argument but that’s ok, I know my limitations.

So why don’t they hold water? Well because they’ve very likely never had to make the product themselves. For example, I’m going to take a look at the BBC’s and Amazon’s popular Top Gear TV show with the three buffoons Jeremy, James, and Richard. They review cars and are often trying to be comedic about it because that’s what pays the bills. But would you trust them to give you a good, honest, and fair critique of a particular car? Would you rate their opinions higher than a career mechanic who has spent their entire life repairing all makes and models of cars and whose opinion on number of faults and ease of maintenance would be rather helpful in making the right purchase for you? You see where I’m going with this right?

The vast majority of whisky reviewers don’t have a background in whisky. They’ve fallen into it through one means or another and that’s fine, I did as well. But does that mean we should implicitly trust them?

My background is in engineering where courses and experience in chemical engineering, materials science, fluid mechanics, organic chemistry, and quality systems all help me understand the many nuances of making whisky, from applying Fick’s diffusion laws to whisky and oxygen permeation through wood staves, process engineering for mass balances, thermodynamics for heat recovery units, fluid mechanics for the mixing of various streams, and organic chemistry for the hydrolyzation of wood into the whisky. But in reality, that only covers the basics.

I’ve never made the stuff despite a hair-brained dream of building a small distillery to retire into, slowly puttering away and making this stuff for fun. So despite me standing on the Dramface box and proclaiming a certain whisky as an 8/10 and another a mere 4, I really am only seeing a part of the picture. And that’s okay, as long as we acknowledge that we have deficiencies in our point of view and are not know-it-alls.

Thank you for reading through my mini-rant. A rant that perhaps only a few may truly understand. Actually, it’s statistically certain that it's only a few. Creators, whether art, horological, architectural, technological, phenomenological, theoretical, or any other sort of creators often face the brunt of the criticism but we should remember there are hard working people on the other end of a product, and we should be fair but kind at the end of the day.So now let’s talk about a whisky created by someone who went all-in and is going through the product development lifecycle.

Broddy’s Review

Anohka This Is Not Whisky, Single Malt Spirit, Heavily Peated, Barrel #52, ex-bourbon, Distilled 2023-02-08, 19 mo old, 375 mL bottle, 55% ABV
CAD$55 (£30) paid

So Anohka. Founded by Gurpreet Ranu and located outside of Spruce Grove, Alberta, this is a true from-the-ground-up enterprise. I’d say it’s likely this is a passion project, but I’ve yet to meet the myth behind this endeavour, but I’d venture to say that anyone half-crazed enough to open a distillery in recent years must be doing it because they love it.

Anohka uses direct fired stills (hooray!); again, only someone chasing the esoterics in the margins would choose such an endeavour. A Meura mash filter, the same used by InchDairnie and the now-stalled Waterford, extracts the precious barley water following mashing allowing the well-water fed Anohka to run with less water and energy inputs. Initially, ex-bourbon casks were chosen as the casks of choice. Screw the Jim Swan-esque STR casks or cask-led screwiness of wet sherry casks, Gurpreet opted to go with the slow maturing and minimal influence of ex-bourbon casks. I mean c’mon! Could this be any more grassroots!

Founded on a 110 acre family farm, barley is grown in a crop rotation to ensure soil regeneration. Farm grown barley is malted by local maltsters Hammer Malt, a very much home-spun farmer turned part-time maltster who built and operates their own malting facility in northern Alberta’s “grain belt”. Funnily enough and quite coincidentally, Hammer Malt’s founder was taught by my mother in grade school and I grew up familiar with their family. Very small world indeed.

I might have to make an Anohka and Hammer Malt road trip sans family so I could spend some quality time with these two outfits and report back! Peated malt is brought in from Scotland however recent efforts have been made to use locally peated grains instead of imported. I’d say we have to wait to see the results, however this tasty little morsel only took 19 months so this experiment might arrive sooner than we think.

To pay the bills, they make gin. And while I’ve yet to try the gin, owing to the missus and I being primarily wine drinkers in our kids-are-finally-in-bed time and my dalliances into whisky, I’ve yet to sample. But their Tempest Gin has been winning awards around the globe and is supposedly made from 10x the “normal” botanicals. And of particular interest to us whisky-nerds is that they take pride in their gin turning cloudy when chilled or mixed!

Enough of a pieced-together backstory, until I visit anyways, let’s get into this whisky (ha, it’s not a whisky yet).

Nose

Clean and fresh. Devoid of pesky %abv or youthful prickles. Bright clean wood smoke carried on a cool fall evening. Honey. Vanilla undertones. Lemon spritz.

It’s not the wildest nose but it is perhaps one of the purest peated whiskies I’ve had.

Palate

Oh boy, I’m enjoying the heck outta this for this is my style of peated ex-bourbon.

Runny honey. Black pepper. Firm dry beachwood smoke that doesn’t punch you in the face but it is far more than playing a background fiddle. A perfectly balanced peat influence here with enough oomph for the peat heads but soft enough to not think you drank liquified cellulosic detritus. Some indistinct brightness, resolving itself into a glazed sour cream donut dusted with icing sugar and the filling of a lemon meringue pie. The barest, and I mean barest, undertone of new make playdough. In fact, most days I never detect a trace of it at all. The pepper plays a less prominent role with successive sips but is never annoying and is par for the course with the strength.

The Dregs

I can’t stop drinking this. Served blind, this will blow your absolute socks off and wreck every tasting event you put it into especially when you reveal that this spirit is this good.

Vive la Creators! For they are the lifeblood, the future, the foundation. And we should shout them from the tippy top peaks of whisky nirvana when they appear.

I instantly thought of the venerable Port Charlotte 10 yo or the monolithic Ardnamurchan Canada single cask when I first sipped this delectable morsel. With a few drops of water, this thing turns into a twin of this Islay stalwart. Similar peat profile (read mainland peat), similar strength, and similar colour (or casking) had me tumbling down the comparison slope. The PC10 is slightly more viscous, slightly sweeter, less smoky smelling, and slightly more nuanced with some darker-style notes (toffee) with less peppery bite; however when considering the age differences between the two, this wee Canuck is standing toe-to-toe and in some cases, stomping on long-standing peated Scottish malts. Astounding, simply wow.

I fully plan on visiting Anohka following this stunner of a ‘spirit’. They are 3.5 hours from me but more importantly, a 45 minute detour from visiting friends and family in Westlock, Alberta where I grew up. A perfect detour if I say so myself. Perhaps sans family so I can geek out however that might be a tall ask.

Upon my initial crack, and also sharing amongst friends who were equally impressed with the quality vs. age comparison, I sent a wee sample Aengus’s way for his independent thoughts.

Score: 7/10 BB

AMC’s Review

To avoid any preconceptions, I didn’t do any research on this spirit before I poured Broddy’s sample into my glencairn and gave it a taste. No googling around or asking AI “what is an Anohka?”. I did have some idea from the handwritten label that it was a peated single malt spirit at 19 months, matured in bourbon. Broddy has filled you in on more of the details above.

Nose

Highland peat. Citrus, lemon, a bit woodsy. Toasted cereal.

Palate

Sweet, thick honey. A prominent cinnamon edge with some other spice notes (Chinese five spice?). Very slight Play-Doh that I get in a lot of smaller craft distilleries but here it’s not a downside at all. Creamy. Sour cream glazed doughnut and graham cracker. The empty glass the next day smells like a barn.

The Dregs

This is quite remarkable. A spirit not old enough to be whisky but could grapple with any 12 year old single malt and come out favourably, if not ahead. It drinks much less than 55% in terms of perceived strength, but the concentration of flavour is there. Where it may miss out, ever so slightly, is in a bit of complexity, but the drinking experience is mega.

A distillery to watch out for. Thanks to Broddy for the sample.

Score: 7/10 AMc

Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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